As a designer or a business owner, staying organized can be invaluable to your success. Collect and organize everything! Sketches, notes, photos of your whiteboard brainstorming sessions, renderings, patterns, and draftings should all be saved. Even failed prototypes and samples, should be retained for future reference.

Many people organize all of this information manually. This approach to the design process may work at first, but we believe organizing all of your brand material “manually” is not the quickest, simplest, and most effective method for helping you get from sketch to finished product in no time. At Maker’s Row, we spent months researching the essential elements of the product creation process created Maker’s Row Projects to keep all of this information organized online. Projects allow you to organize the various types of files in your project, and share them instantly with your manufacturers.

Why?

Developing a workflow for your team:

As your team grows, you will need to pass some of your responsibilities on to a larger design and operations team.  When that happens, it’s important that everyone on the team, is working in a similar fashion. Products will be produced faster as a result of having a template to work from.

Developing a workflow for your team will allow for products to be produced faster as a result of having a template to work from. @MakersRow

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Proving to your investors that you have a plan:

Investors want to make sure you have a plan for making and distributing your product profitably. Proving to them that you have a documented system, and workflow shows them that you are capable of continuing to produce quality work. It also shows them that you are able to learn and grow as you iterate, which is an invaluable trait.

Telling a story:

Your product becomes more meaningful to both manufacturers and consumers when they understand, and empathize with it’s inception. Allowing consumers to connect with you and your business on a more personal level, gives your brand a human element that can’t be duplicated.

Your product becomes more meaningful to both manufacturers and consumers when they understand, and empathize with it’s inception. @MakersRow

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 Remembering how far you’ve come:

There’s nothing better than looking back at where you started a year ago, and seeing how far you’ve come. Take a look at other designers who began and completed their design processes, and how they used Maker’s Row Projects to manufacture their designs locally.

If you’ve created a Maker’s Row Project, email us your Project link for a chance to be featured!

A special thanks to Ugmonk for the beautiful sketches!